Collegiate boys of summer
Summer’s here, that means summer jobs for some, skipping out of work every chance you can of others, long days, and of course, baseball.
While a major league game seems to always be on the tube, college baseball games are hardly ever televised and regular reports are scarce. In order to get regular updates on ESPN, you have to navigate through the general college sports section. The national pastime is competing for webspace with lacrosse, soccer, and softball.
This is in stark contrast to college sports big two, football and basketball, who share the stage with their professional counterparts, have their own sections in most sports sections, and in the case of college basketball, virtually shut down the month of March.
But why is college baseball often overlooked?
There is no lack of legacies, as teams like UNC, Clemson, Stanford, University of Kentucky, and University of Texas regularly are batting it out for the number 1 spot in June. And there is no shortage of college talent either, with schools like UCLA routinely putting out talent that goes into the majors.
Many have pointed the lack of interest in college baseball at the farm league system of baseball, which is often where college players go if they eventually want to make it in the majors. This system of farm teams helps separate the chaff from the wheat when it comes to talent, and diplomas do not necessarily mean better athletes and rarely do you ever see a college player drafted directly to the majors.
What this ultimately does is lessen the role of college baseball in the majors, making it harder for fans to watch a player move from college to professional like in football or basketball. Careers like those of Jordan or Johnson are hard to find, where fans were able to see them work their way through the tourney and then have fruitful careers in the NBA.
Also adding to the competition is the role of foreign leagues as pools for talent. Major League Baseball pools from not only the US, but from Latin America and Japan. In some of these cases, baseball talent is tapping players as young as fifteen, making college a hard sell.
But all is not lost for college baseball. As June rolls around the College World Series heats up and college baseball starts competing with the MLB for ESPN airtime. This is where you can watch many of the future prospects for the majors start to learn the finesse of batting under pressure and maybe, one day, see the 19-year-old stepping up to the plate transform into a major league slugger.
--Boomer
http://www.collegiateliving.com E-mail: info@collegiateliving.com
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Finals and finality
As the weather warms and the days get longer, finals are upon us. Once again will college students resume the tradition of late night cramming, accelerated paper writing, and living on a healthy diet of caffeine, no-doze, cigarettes, and fingernails?
There are students out there that throughout the semester planned for finals, took detailed notes, and linked class topics together to create a grand narrative to which they will expound in their blue books. But unfortunately, most of us aren’t them.
Across the nation students will be piling into libraries, be it Pattee Library at Penn State , Draughon Library at Auburn , or College Library at UCLA , and feverishly cramming as much information about the 30 Years War, thermoclines, and French literature into their heads as possible. Once the last paper is turned in, the last Scantron penciled-in, and the last blue book filled with facts, students may utter a sigh of relief and look back at the past couple weeks with a sense of accomplishment.
For those of us who are lucky enough to have survived this period, we may have forgotten the challenges of finals because we’ve been inundated time and time again with our jobs and lives. But remember, while in life seems to be much more intense than anything College had to offer, it is a slow burn of responsibilities, not a downpour of fleeting knowledge.
And for what is this rite of passage that finals are for? The finality of university study, a cap and gown, commencement speeches the movers and shakers of the world, and an expensive piece of paper that tells the world that you made it!
But graduation is a solemn time for many, a sign that after years of hard study and harder dedication, they have risen to the challenge and now face an even greater challenge, the unstructured joy of self determination. For now the real challenge of life begins, where your learning is not based on the whim of a professor or course advisor, and you can determine the path you want to take.
College is an interesting incubation period, halfway between the supervised days under your parents’ roof and the responsibility laden time that waits after college. It lets us develop into rounded individuals, who at the time may scoff at the idea that knowing German will ever come in handy until they find themselves lost in the back alleys of Dusseldorf, with a sense of accomplishment.
-Boomer
www.collegiateliving.com
info@collegiateliving.com
There are students out there that throughout the semester planned for finals, took detailed notes, and linked class topics together to create a grand narrative to which they will expound in their blue books. But unfortunately, most of us aren’t them.
Across the nation students will be piling into libraries, be it Pattee Library at Penn State , Draughon Library at Auburn , or College Library at UCLA , and feverishly cramming as much information about the 30 Years War, thermoclines, and French literature into their heads as possible. Once the last paper is turned in, the last Scantron penciled-in, and the last blue book filled with facts, students may utter a sigh of relief and look back at the past couple weeks with a sense of accomplishment.
For those of us who are lucky enough to have survived this period, we may have forgotten the challenges of finals because we’ve been inundated time and time again with our jobs and lives. But remember, while in life seems to be much more intense than anything College had to offer, it is a slow burn of responsibilities, not a downpour of fleeting knowledge.
And for what is this rite of passage that finals are for? The finality of university study, a cap and gown, commencement speeches the movers and shakers of the world, and an expensive piece of paper that tells the world that you made it!
But graduation is a solemn time for many, a sign that after years of hard study and harder dedication, they have risen to the challenge and now face an even greater challenge, the unstructured joy of self determination. For now the real challenge of life begins, where your learning is not based on the whim of a professor or course advisor, and you can determine the path you want to take.
College is an interesting incubation period, halfway between the supervised days under your parents’ roof and the responsibility laden time that waits after college. It lets us develop into rounded individuals, who at the time may scoff at the idea that knowing German will ever come in handy until they find themselves lost in the back alleys of Dusseldorf, with a sense of accomplishment.
-Boomer
www.collegiateliving.com
info@collegiateliving.com
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Traditions
Traditions...
As the students of Arizona State University strip down to their underwear and ran through their campus, they were starting what many hope will be a yearly charity event, and even more importantly, a tradition. ASU is not the first school to have an Undie Run, UCLA has been having nearly-naked runs since 2002, and the run has become something of a tradition to the Bruins. Penn State
is witness to an annual bare-ass event during finals, where mostly male students streak down Mifflin Road, trying to avoid getting arrested for public lewdness.
But what makes a onetime event such as the ASU Undie Run catch on and become a tradition? Every school has several, be it to support the football team or to break the stress of finals. Yale has the ball hop in December, a roving semi-formal that moves from one college residence hall to another throughout the night.
Texas A&M has the Midnight Yell practice, where yell leaders lead the crowd of Aggiesthrough fight songs, old army yells, and chants the night before the first football game as a way to pump up the Twelfth Man, the Aggie faithful.
UNC has the Old Well, where freshman line-up to drink from the well before their first class, because tradition holds that if a student drinks from the well before their first class they will graduate with a 4.0. While campaigns to stop grade inflation have made getting a 4.0 a bit harder than drinking from an old fountain, the tradition still lives.
But what makes a tradition last? Most seem to start out as informal events, the brainchild of a group of students who will probably drift back into obscurity but whose actions will resonate throughout the ages.
It often starts as something simple, like at Boston College’s
Superfans, who were trying to make the Eagles games more exciting, creating a “Gold Rush Game.” The Superfans managed to turn the entire student section gold with “Superfan” t-shirts during a televised game against Virginia Tech, and now no game, be it basketball or volleyball, is without a few specs of gold scattered throughout the crowd.
These events, myths, and anomalies help unify the student body, and those that participate seem to develop a vested interested in not only their GPA and classes, but the culture and social aspect of the school. It adds much more to the classes, the games, and the parties. Having traditions not only helped us get through the finals, but they also are something we hold onto well after we graduate. They help us reconnect to our glory days, returning that gleam of idealism and youth that has lost its luster after the years away from our hollowed days at college.
--Boomer
http://www.collegiateliving.com E-mail: info@collegiateliving.com
As the students of Arizona State University strip down to their underwear and ran through their campus, they were starting what many hope will be a yearly charity event, and even more importantly, a tradition. ASU is not the first school to have an Undie Run, UCLA has been having nearly-naked runs since 2002, and the run has become something of a tradition to the Bruins. Penn State
is witness to an annual bare-ass event during finals, where mostly male students streak down Mifflin Road, trying to avoid getting arrested for public lewdness.
But what makes a onetime event such as the ASU Undie Run catch on and become a tradition? Every school has several, be it to support the football team or to break the stress of finals. Yale has the ball hop in December, a roving semi-formal that moves from one college residence hall to another throughout the night.
Texas A&M has the Midnight Yell practice, where yell leaders lead the crowd of Aggiesthrough fight songs, old army yells, and chants the night before the first football game as a way to pump up the Twelfth Man, the Aggie faithful.
UNC has the Old Well, where freshman line-up to drink from the well before their first class, because tradition holds that if a student drinks from the well before their first class they will graduate with a 4.0. While campaigns to stop grade inflation have made getting a 4.0 a bit harder than drinking from an old fountain, the tradition still lives.
But what makes a tradition last? Most seem to start out as informal events, the brainchild of a group of students who will probably drift back into obscurity but whose actions will resonate throughout the ages.
It often starts as something simple, like at Boston College’s
Superfans, who were trying to make the Eagles games more exciting, creating a “Gold Rush Game.” The Superfans managed to turn the entire student section gold with “Superfan” t-shirts during a televised game against Virginia Tech, and now no game, be it basketball or volleyball, is without a few specs of gold scattered throughout the crowd.
These events, myths, and anomalies help unify the student body, and those that participate seem to develop a vested interested in not only their GPA and classes, but the culture and social aspect of the school. It adds much more to the classes, the games, and the parties. Having traditions not only helped us get through the finals, but they also are something we hold onto well after we graduate. They help us reconnect to our glory days, returning that gleam of idealism and youth that has lost its luster after the years away from our hollowed days at college.
--Boomer
http://www.collegiateliving.com E-mail: info@collegiateliving.com
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